Drinking coffee HALVES the risk of mouth cancer - even in smokers and drinkers (?)

But MOST Americans drink coffee.  So what is going on here?  Where is the comparison group?  Tea-drinkers?  Maybe they have shown only that tea drinkers in America have poor health.  It's just correlational stuff with purely speculative conclusions

Drinking four cups of coffee a day almost halves the risk of deadly mouth cancer, according to new research.  The latest study shows downing the beverage every day has a powerful protective effect against tumours that form in the mouth and throat.

The association held true regardless of how often the person drank alcohol or smoked.

Scientists found decaffeinated coffee also reduced the risk, although to a lesser extent, while drinking tea did nothing to prevent the disease.

The latest findings, by a team of researchers from the American Cancer Society in Atlanta, Georgia, suggest it may not be caffeine that protects against the formation of malignant growths in and around the mouth.  Instead, they said, it's likely to be due to some of the hundreds of other naturally-occurring antioxidant chemicals found in coffee.

The results back up a similar study published two years ago by a different team of researchers, who found four cups a day slashed cancer risk by 39 per cent.

British consumers guzzle their way through an estimated 70 million cups of coffee a day.

The popular drink has already been linked with reducing the chances of getting bowel cancer, stroke and Alzheimer's disease.

However, drinking too much may increase heart rate and blood pressure and pregnant women are advised to limit their intake because of concerns that excess coffee may increase their chances of having small babies.

To see if coffee offered any protection, researchers studied nearly one million men and women who signed up to the Cancer Prevention Study II, which started in the US back in 1982.

They identified 868 volunteers who had died from cancer of the mouth or pharynx - the cavity between the nose and mouth - over a 30 year period.

When they studied patients' dietary habits and compared them with others who stayed cancer free during the same period, they found drinking caffeinated coffee in reasonably large quantities appeared to have a potent effect.

Those downing more than four cups a day were 49 per cent less likely to suffer tumours than others who drank little or no coffee.

Decaffeinated coffee also showed some protection, but the numbers involved were insufficient to draw firm conclusions, the researchers said.

Tea lovers, on the other hand, got no protection against mouth cancers from their favourite beverage.

In a report on the findings, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, the researchers said it was likely that coffee's multitude of health-boosting ingredients shielded the body against the formation of tumours.

'Coffee contains multiple biologically active compounds that may help to lower the risk of developing and dying from cancer,' they said.

'In animal and cell cultures, no single anti-cancer mechanism has been identified but rather many pathways appear to be involved, depending upon the specific compound and anatomic site.'

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Jogging outside in Belgium seems to make you stupid - and more likely to suffer mental health problems

There may be something in this but it is a very short-term study which overlooks the possibility of adaptation.  There is also no doubt that the findings would have conformed to experimenter expectations, which is always a warning bell.

It has long been hailed as beneficial to both body and mind - and if nothing else, a form of stress release after a hard day at the office. 

But new research suggests exercising outside could do more harm than good when it comes to your brain.  For jogging in busy, traffic-filled areas could actually cause mental decline.

Belgian researchers have found that people who live in a city and exercise outdoors have higher levels of inflammation and lower scores on cognitive tests than those who exercise outside in the suburbs.

In a study, they separated exercisers into two groups who exercised three times a week for 12 weeks, between midday and 1pm. One group alternated and walking in a busy, urban area - the other in a rural location.

The researchers, from Vrije Universiteit Brussel, then gave the subjects a test to measure their response time and attention span.

They found that high levels of air pollution in the city prevented participants from getting some of the brain-boosting benefits of exercise, such as the ability to absorb new information and a reduced chance of mental health problems.

The city joggers also had significantly higher blood levels of some inflammation markers, Men's Health magazine reported.

This is important because inflammation in the brain is associated with mental illness.

Last month, U.S. research found that higher level of air pollution in towns and cities is ageing the brains of over-50s by up to three years.

Scientists have found that exposure to higher levels of air pollution can lead to decreased brain power in over-50s.

In a study of almost 15,000 older adults, researchers at the US-based National Institute on Aging found fine air particulate matter may be an important environmental risk factor for reduced thought power.

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Meningitis link to smoking in pregnancy: Cigarettes can treble child’s chance of developing the disease

Boring rubbish:  Working class people are more likely to smoke and they are less healthy anyway.  Connection between smoking and meningitis just assertion

Smoking during pregnancy can treble the baby’s chance of developing meningitis, researchers warn, and children exposed to smoke from a parent’s cigarettes at home are twice as likely to have the deadly illness.

Scientists estimate that more than 600 children a year in Britain develop meningitis as a result of their parents’ second-hand smoke.

They think that passive smoking gradually weakens children’s immune system making them more susceptible to the illness.

Researchers from the University of Nottingham analysed 18 studies which looked at the link between passive smoking and meningitis.

They found that children exposed to second hand smoke in the home were more than twice as likely to get the illness.

The under-fives were even more vulnerable - they were found to be two and a half times more at risk.

And children whose mothers smoked during pregnancy were three times more likely to get meningitis, the study published in BMC Public Health found.

Lead researcher Dr Rachael Murray, from the UK Centre for Tobacco Studies at the University of Nottingham, said: ‘We estimate that an extra 630 cases of childhood invasive meningococcal disease every year are directly attributable to second-hand smoke in the UK alone.

'While we cannot be sure exactly how tobacco smoke is affecting these children, the findings from this study highlight consistent evidence of the further harms of smoking around children and during pregnancy, and thus parents and family members should be encouraged to not smoke in the home or around children.’

In recent years a number of studies have shown passive smoking increases a child’s risk of meningitis.

But this is one of the first to show the link between a mother smoking during pregnancy.

The findings of this latest study imply this process begins while the baby is still in the womb.

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Researchers repudiate BPA junk science

The chemical bisphenol A (BPA) — which is used to make hard, clear plastics and resins that line food containers — regularly appears in news headlines claiming the substance causes everything from heart disease to obesity. But a new study on the topic shows that much of this “research” is little more than junk science.

Many of the alarming BPA studies suffer from a common flaw: they rely on National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data. NHANES data are produced via a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) program to assess national health trends. As I noted in a prior blog post, CDC collects health data from a different group of volunteers every year via physical exams and interviews. In addition to recording health aliments of the volunteers, the data also measure BPA in urine and blood. Numerous BPA studies pull the data from various years to see if there are correlations between certain illnesses and levels of BPA in the volunteers’ urine or blood.

There are myriad ways to manipulate these data to generate an array of results, such as excluding certain participants as “outliers” or pulling out select subsets of data from the larger database; therefore, findings and conclusions can vary between studies. In addition, we can expect some associations to emerge by mere chance. Meanwhile, studies that don’t find associations, unfortunately, don’t get published as often and don’t grab headlines because they are not as interesting. Hence, those studies that are published create false impressions about the state of the research.

A key problem with using these data to draw any conclusion is the fact that NHANES data only includes “spot sampling” of BPA — measuring exposure via one (or a couple) urine sample per subject. But BPA levels in urine change practically hourly, which means that one-time measurements tell us nothing about actual exposure. Specifically, a person might have high levels in their urine at one moment simply because he or she just drank a soda from a can lined with BPA resins. But if researchers test this same person just a few hours later, the results may indicate very low BPA exposure. Thus, data from “spot sampling” of BPA are largely meaningless because they don’t measure long-term exposure.

Second, all these studies largely ignore the fact that the human body quickly metabolizes BPA before it can have any health impacts. For more background on these two issues, see my blog posts on BPA and coronary heart disease and BPA’s alleged impacts on obesity.

Higher quality and more comprehensive studies and scientific reviews of the full body of research find that BPA risks are low and its benefits outweigh any such risks.

Today, a new study shows that NHANES data can be manipulated to provide a variety of conflicting results. But more importantly, it explains why NHANES data is inappropriate for drawing any conclusions about BPA risks. Specifically, it notes:

    Our objectives were to analyze four NHANES datasets using consistent a priori selected methods to address the following questions: Is there a consistent association between urinary bisphenol A (BPA) measures and diabetes, coronary heart disease (CHD), and/or heart attack across surveys? Is NHANES an appropriate dataset for investigating associations between chemicals with short physiologic half-lives such as BPA and chronic diseases with multi-factorial etiologies?…

    Using scientifically and clinically supportable exclusion criteria and outcome definitions, we consistently found no associations between urinary BPA and heart disease or diabetes. These results do not support associations and causal inferences reported in previous studies that used different criteria and definitions. We are not drawing conclusions regarding whether BPA is a risk factor for these diseases. We are stating the opposite–that using cross-sectional datasets like NHANES to draw such conclusions about short-lived environmental chemicals and chronic complex diseases is inappropriate. We need to expend resources on appropriately designed epidemiologic studies and toxicological explorations to understand whether these types of chemicals play a causal role in chronic diseases. …

    To be clear, we are not drawing conclusions as to whether BPA is a risk factor for any of the chronic diseases discussed in this paper. In fact, we are stating the opposite – that using the NHANES surveys to draw such conclusions about short-lived environmental chemicals and chronic complex diseases is inappropriate.

SOURCE

Mistletoe: A Kiss-Off to Cancer?

Laboratory glassware findings only

Mistletoe — the cheery kiss-inducing Christmas plant — contains a natural compound that has been found to have potent anti-cancer properties.  Scientists at the University of Adelaide in Australia have determined the extract of mistletoe could either assist chemotherapy or act as an alternative to drugs as a treatment for colon cancer, the second leading cause of cancer death in the Western world.

Mistletoe extract is now used as an alternative colon cancer therapy in some parts of Europe, but lack of scientific testing has kept it off the market in Australia and the United States. That new research, led by Zahra Lotfollahi, could change that.

For the study, Lotfollahi and colleagues compared the effectiveness of three types of mistletoe extract and chemotherapy on colon cancer cells and healthy intestinal cells.  In laboratory studies, she found that one of the mistletoe extracts — from a species known as Fraxini, which grows on ash trees — was more effective than chemotherapy against colon cancer cells and yet was not as harmful to healthy intestinal cells as conventional chemo. The lab tests also found the extract boosted the anti-cancer properties of the drugs.

"This is an important result because we know that chemotherapy is effective at killing healthy cells as well as cancer cells,” said Lotfollahi. “This can result in severe side effects for the patient, such as [ulcers in the mouth] and hair loss.

"Our laboratory studies have shown Fraxini mistletoe extract by itself to be highly effective at reducing the viability of colon cancer cells. At certain concentrations, Fraxini also increased the potency of chemotherapy against the cancer cells.”

Gordon Howarth, University of Adelaide professor and Cancer Council researcher, said more studies are needed before the mistletoe extract could be refined for use in cancer care.

"This is just the first important step in what we hope will lead to further research, and eventually clinical trials, of mistletoe extract in Australia," Howarth said.

SOURCE





Study: Beer is good for you, has anti-virus powers

Says Japanese brewer

Consuming large quantities of a key ingredient in beer can protect against winter sniffles and even some serious illnesses in small children, a Japanese brewery said citing a scientific study.

A chemical compound in hops, the plant brewers use to give beer its bitter taste, provides an effective guard against a virus that can cause severe forms of pneumonia and bronchitis in youngsters, Sapporo Breweries said Wednesday.

In research with scientists at Sapporo Medical University, the compound — humulone — was found to be effective in curbing the respiratory syncytial (RS) virus, said the company, which funded the study.

“The RS virus can cause serious pneumonia and breathing difficulties for infants and toddlers, but no vaccination is available at the moment to contain it,” said Jun Fuchimoto, a researcher from the company.

The virus tends to spread in winter and can also cause cold-like symptoms in adults.

Fuchimoto said such small quantities of humulone were present in beer that someone would have to drink around 30 cans, each of 350 millilitres (12 oz), for it to have any virus-fighting effect.

“We are now studying the feasibility of applying humulone to food or non-alcoholic products,” he said. “The challenge really is that the bitter taste is going to be difficult for children.”

The research also found that humulone alleviated inflammation caused by infection from the virus, the brewery said.

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Book's theory on women's diets links infertility to low-fat food

All theory by the sound of it

WOMEN'S low-fat, highly processed diets are contributing to low fertility and poor health, a new book claims.  While women wanting to get pregnant have long been warned about obesity, the authors of Eat Fat, Be Thin say a low-fat diet is not the answer.

"Low-fat foods have been linked to infertility in both men and women because they don't contain the adequate nutrients," the authors - TV personality Andi Lew and holistic fertility expert Dr Natalie Kringoudis - say in their book.

"Whole foods are always, hands-down, the best option, and you end up with a stronger immune system or become more fertile."

Monash IVF clinician Nicole Hope said a healthy diet of fresh foods, fruit and vegetables and lean meat was important for women wanting to get pregnant.

"This includes healthy fats that aid the process of ovulation," Dr Hope said. She said doctors did not recommend a fat-free diet because hormones required essential fatty acids.

Louise Johnson, a spokeswoman for Your Fertility, an independent coalition of fertility experts, said: "You increase your chances of conceiving and having a healthy pregnancy and baby if you and your partner are a healthy weight," she said.

Professor Michael Permezel, president of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said a nutritionally balanced diet would "benefit both fertility and the early development of the pregnancy, should conception occur".

Amber Hawkins, 36, of South Melbourne, had been trying for 18 months to fall pregnant, and had one failed attempt at IVF before Dr Kringoudis advised her on diet changes.

"Now I am nearly 20 weeks' pregnant and couldn't be happier," she said.

The book suggests women wanting to get pregnant eat a diet that includes eggs, avocados, nuts, grains and coconut.

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Fat does not make you fat?

One physicist says eating fat does not cause obesity, but not everyone is convinced

The US physicist Gary Taubes has lobbed this scientific "grenade" in two books he has written about obesity and nutrition. His premise? That the hormone insulin is responsible for obesity, and levels of insulin spike when we eat carbohydrates, leading us to get fat. Eating fat, he says, does not have this effect on insulin and therefore is not the culprit in making people overweight or obese.

The idea that people are fat because they eat too much says nothing meaningful about why excess calories get stored as fat, says Taubes, who studied applied physics at Harvard. He argues that carbohydrates, such as fructose, corn, potatoes, rice and grains, affect insulin, a powerful regulator of fat. Fat is readily stored in the presence of insulin because it causes the enzyme lipoprotein lipase to suck fat inside cells where it is stored. The body only makes insulin when blood sugar levels rise, and all carbohydrates are metabolised as sugar.

Thus, if we do not eat carbohydrates, there will not be excess sugar in the blood, the body will not make insulin and fat will not be stored by cells, Taubes believes.

Meats, fish, eggs, butter and oil contain few, if any, carbohydrates and do not cause insulin levels to spike, which Taubes says means people can eat as much of those foods as they want so long as they also avoid carbohydrates.

"So this idea all calories are created equal; well, in terms of the energy in the calories, yes … but in terms of the fate of the nutrient downstream, the same amount of calories of different nutrients will have a dramatically different effect," Taubes says.

It is a bold stance to take amid the present epidemic of obesity and diabetes, with Australian public health guidelines staunchly placing the blame on eating too much and not exercising enough.

While his ideas are controversial, they are not completely new. Robert Atkins's revolutionary Atkins diet in the 1970s had similar ideas, and low-GI diets also follow some of these principles. But Taubes goes deeply into the science behind the high-fat diet, picks apart studies by major universities more rigorously and is doing so at a time when consumers are frustrated by their inability to lose weight no matter which diets they follow.

Taubes is keen for his work to be digested by health experts clamouring to find some solution to the growing obesity epidemic that is threatening to swamp health systems around the world.

Even Australian nutritionists who view Taubes as a conspiracy theorist because of his criticisms of those who pioneered the idea that fat causes obesity, admit his research has enough credibility and science behind it to be considered.

Whether you believe fat is to blame for rising obesity or not, it is clear the problem is getting worse.

More low-fat foods are being produced and consumed than ever before. Red meat consumption is also declining, with beef consumed in the Australian market decreasing by 3 per cent in 2010-11. Yet, obesity rates in Australia are still climbing.

Taubes says it was when gluttony and sloth became demonised as causes of obesity in the 1960s, that the field of nutrition lost its way while waistlines continued to grow.

"Pre-World War II, all of the best science was done in Europe where there was a culture of excellence in physics, biology and medicine," he says.

"Obesity was nothing about eating too much or exercising too little, rather researchers said obesity was a hormonal, regulatory defect just like any other growth disorder. They said there was an excess accumulation of fat occurring, fat is regulated, and so therefore something was wrong with that regulatory system in fat people.

"Then the war came, these researchers disappeared, and so did their accepted theory of obesity."

In his books, Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat, Taubes writes that a small but influential contingent of American nutritionists - Jean Mayer, Fred Stare, Jules Hirsch, George Bray, Theodore Vanitallie, Albert Stunkard, George Cahill and Philip White - then became the leading authorities in the field. "They all came out of the north-eastern academic corridor - Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Rockerfeller, the University of Pennsylvania - and they all knew each other," he writes.

"None of these authorities actually specialised in the clinical treatment of obesity [except for one], who did so as a psychiatrist treating an eating disorder. Nor were they necessarily the best scientists in their field."

In the late '70s, Taubes says, these researchers addressed a committee charged with establishing the "Dietary Goals for Americans", embracing the committee's recommendation of a national diet lower in fat and higher in carbohydrates.

This was despite one of the scientists, Van Itallie, admitting to the committee that he was unaware of any research conclusively supporting the low fat, high carbohydrate theory of weight loss.

"Thus, what I am saying is an assumption rather than a statement of established fact," he told them.

Despite this, the new guidelines were released, and nutritionists and public health authorities latched on to two ideas - that dietary fat causes heart disease and obesity is an energy imbalance between calories in and out, Taubes says.

"The existence of these hypotheses seemed to be reason enough to believe they were true," he says.

"We ignored everything that had been learnt about causes of obesity until then and ran with it."

Taubes has been reporting on controversial science since the early 1980s. First, he wrote a book challenging the theory of cold fusion, a hypothetical type of nuclear reaction. In the 1990s, his focus turned to public health and medical issues, as he believed nutrition was one of the most glaring examples of pseudoscience at play. As low-fat eating became the order of the day, food manufacturers replaced fat in foods with sugar, and as fat consumption declined, Taubes says, obesity, diabetes and the incidence of heart disease kept increasing. He interviewed more than 600 clinicians and investigators in the US and studied peer-reviewed nutrition research from leading medical journals and universities to find out why.

Taubes gained attention when New York Times Magazine published one of his articles in 2002, in which he questioned low-fat diets and promoted a similar way of eating as the Atkins diet before it. He says that diet gained so much controversy because it was introduced when fat had become an accepted culprit by the medical establishment.

While Taubes does not dispute that expending more calories than consumed will lead to weight loss, he argues that method is largely unsustainable, unnecessary and not the most efficient way to prevent fat from being stored by cells.

There are studies that support Taubes's theory, including one from Stanford University published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2007, which monitored 77 women for a year. Women placed on a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet lost more weight than those who ate a diet based on US government guidelines that promote a diet lower in fat and higher in carbohydrates.

Another criticism of Atkins and low-carbohydrate diets is that studies have indicated red meat consumption is associated with heart disease. A Harvard University study published this year found eating a portion of processed red meat daily boosted the risk of dying young by up to 20 per cent.

It is another area of nutrition science challenged by Taubes, who says red meat consumption has only been found as being associated with heart disease and early death, not as a cause of it. On his blog, Taubes wrote: "Moreover, this meat-eating association with disease is a tiny association. Tiny. It's not the 20-fold increased risk of lung cancer that pack-a-day smokers have compared to non-smokers. It's a 0.2-fold increased risk."

Taubes used himself to prove his point, for several months eating three eggs with cheese, bacon and sausage for breakfast every morning, a couple of bunless cheeseburgers or a roast chicken for lunch and steak for dinner, and cooking with butter. His blood test results before and after this "diet" were posted on his website. They showed after his meat binge, his cholesterol and glucose levels were well within the normal range and had actually improved.

In his books, Taubes refers to studies from the 19th and early 20th centuries where people from very poor populations, who ate little aside from bread and corn, also displayed moderate to high levels of obesity. But these studies have fallen by the wayside, he says, partly because the low-fat dogma has become so enshrined in medical thinking.

"The medical community believes it's an energy balance problem and people powerfully believe that," Taubes says. "If you spend your whole career thinking obesity is about eating too much, it's very hard to turn around and say, 'I was wrong'. Imagine the public health authorities in the US and Australia saying 'Look, we were wrong, we're sorry, maybe we killed some your loved ones but eventually we got it right'.

"It doesn't help their credibility."

Professor Tim Gill, from Sydney University's Boden institute of obesity, nutrition, exercise and eating disorders, describes Taubes as a respected science writer who is well researched but divisive.

A growing number of academics and clinicians support his research, Gill says, but he believes Taubes, who also has a masters in journalism from Columbia University, has not done enough to prove that public health guidelines should be overhauled just yet.

"Journalists love to come up with something that is the antithesis of what's currently held by academics because they like to believe in a conspiracy," Gill says.

"He's come up with an idea, which is perfectly rational to a point, which some academics agree with, but he can be as selective as anyone else in the evidence he uses to support his own arguments."

Gill admits researchers interested in nutrition have generally been guilty of being too simplistic in the past, by focusing on one aspect, such as fat.

But by only criminalising carbohydrates, he believes Taubes has ignored many other elements of weight gain as well.

"The causes of obesity and weight gain are much more complex than just carbohydrates," Gill says.

"Whilst we were happy in the past to accept one or two big studies from big names and go along with it, all research has its problems and its limitations. And despite all this evidence we have, we still really don't have absolute clarity around certain aspects of nutrition."

Even Taubes acknowledges his theory of obesity needs more research.

In September, he launched the non-profit Nutrition Science Initiative in San Diego, which describes its purpose as to "facilitate and fund rigorous, well-controlled experiments targeted at resolving unambiguously many of the outstanding nutrition controversies - to answer the question definitively of what constitutes a healthy diet and dedicated to dramatically reducing the economic and social burden of obesity and obesity-related diseases."

Led by Taubes, the initiative will carry out highly controlled experiments headed by researchers from around the US - including those sceptical of the carbohydrate hypotheses Taubes hopes to test.

SOURCE

Food Bunk

John Stossel

With America's "fiscal cliff" approaching, pundits wring their hands over the supposed catastrophe that government spending cuts will bring. A scare newsletter called "Food Poisoning Bulletin" warns that if government reduces food inspections, "food will be less safe ... (because) marginal companies ... (will) cut corners."

We're going to die!

Most people believe that without government meat inspection, food would be filthy. We read "The Jungle," Upton Sinclair's depiction of the meatpacking business, and assume that the FDA and the Food Safety and Inspection Service are all that stand between us and E. coli. Meatpacking conditions were disgusting. Government intervened. Now, we're safe! A happy ending to a story of callous greed.

The scheming lawyers behind the "Food Poisoning Bulletin" argue that without regulation companies will "cut corners." After all, they say, sanitation costs money, so lack of regulation "creates a competitive disadvantage for companies that want to produce quality products."

But that's bunk. It's not government that keeps E. coli to a minimum. It's competition. Tyson Foods, Perdue and McDonald's have brands to maintain -- and customers to lose. Ask Jack in the Box. It lost millions after a food-poisoning scandal.

Fear of getting a bad reputation makes food producers even more careful than government requires. Since the Eisenhower administration, our stodgy government has paid an army of union inspectors to eyeball chickens in every single processing plant. But bacteria are invisible!

Fortunately, food producers run much more sophisticated tests on their own. One employs 2,000 more safety inspectors than government requires: "To kill pathogens, beef carcasses are treated with rinses and a 185-degree steam vacuum," an executive told me. She also asked that I not reveal the name of her company -- it fears retaliation from regulators.

"Production facilities are checked for sanitation with microbiological testing. If anything is detected ... we re-clean the equipment. ... Equipment is routinely taken completely apart to be swab-tested."

None of that is required by government. Government regulation may help a little, but we are safe mostly because of competitive markets. Competition protects us better than politicians.

But people don't trust companies. So it is easy to scare people about food. And the news media know that finding "problems" makes reporters look like crusading journalists. Earlier this year, my old employer, ABC News, "alerted" the public to a new threat, ground beef made with "pink slime."

It sounds awful! ABC's reporting frightened most school systems so much that they stopped using that form of meat. The food company lost 80 percent of its business.

But the scare is bunk. What ABC calls "pink slime" is just as appetizing as other food.

"Bunk is the polite word," Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center says. "ABC went on a crusade. Three nights in a row back in March, they pounded on this."

Well, why shouldn't they, if there's something called "pink slime" in beef?

"Because it's not pink slime. It's ground beef."

Then how did this all get started?

"A couple activists who used to work for the FDA didn't like this really cool scientific process that separates the beef trimming so you get the remaining ground beef. So they coined this term deliberately to try to hurt this company."

The company, Beef Products Inc., does something unique. It takes the last bit of trim meat off the bone by heating it slightly. That saves money and arguably helps the environment -- not using that meat would waste 5,000 cows a day. In 20 years, there is no record of anybody being hurt by what ABC and its activists call "pink slime" -- what the industry just calls "lean beef trimmings" or "finely textured beef."

"Everybody constantly says, 'You should eat leaner beef.' So when we try to eat the leaner beef, then they take that away from us, too," Gainor said. "The company ... has received awards for how good a job they do for consumer safety. It was just one constant hit job."

An effective one. After ABC's reports, Beef Products Inc. closed three out of its four plants. Seven hundred workers lost jobs.

Scientifically illiterate, business-hating media will always do scare stories. Don't believe them.

Most of them, anyway.

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Anti-depressants could help stroke patients recover more quickly by 'rebuilding' the brain

Cochrane conclusions are very careful so this is hopeful  --but still early days

Anti-depressants could help recovery after a stroke - even in patients who are not depressed, research suggests.  The drugs could reduce dependence, physical disability, depression and anxiety in the first year after a stroke, according to the study published by the Cochrane Library.

They could also promote the growth of new nerve cells in the brain or protect other cells damaged by stroke, the authors suggest.

And by preventing depression they may encourage more patients to be physically active.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh examined 52 studies concerning selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

Professor Gillian Mead, professor of stroke and elderly care medicine at the university, said: 'Anti-depressants have been successfully used for many years to relieve depression.

'However, it now appears that they also have effects on the brain that may help patients make a better recovery from the physical effects of stroke.

'The results of this meta-analysis are extremely promising. We do not yet fully understand how anti-depressants could boost recovery after stroke, but it may be because they promote the growth of new nerve cells in the brain, or protect cells damaged by stroke.'

She added that by preventing depression, the drugs may help patients to be more physically active which is known to aid overall recovery.

'We now need to carry out a number of much larger clinical trials in order to establish exactly if, how and to what extent antidepressants can help stroke survivors recover.'

Commenting on the research, Dr Dale Webb, director of research and information at the Stroke Association, said: 'There are now over a million people living in the UK with the disabling effects of stroke.  'With death rates from stroke declining, it’s increasingly important to find new treatments to help survivors make their best possible recovery.

'The results of this meta-analysis are very encouraging and highlight the need for further clinical research trials.

'If these trials are positive, antidepressants could reduce the disabling effects of stroke in tens of thousands of patients every year.

'However, we are a long way off this type of treatment being offered to stroke patients to reduce the physical effects of the condition. We look forward to the results of further research.'

SOURCE

Chlorine in tap water linked to increase in number of people developing food allergies

This is just speculation.  Maybe dichlorophenol is a byproduct of allergies or allergy treatments, for instance

Chlorine in tap water has been linked to the rising number of people developing food allergies, a study has revealed. The chemical, which is used to treat drinking water and is also present in commonly-available pesticides and household items, may weaken food tolerance in some individuals.

Researchers found adults with high levels of dichlorophenol – a chemical by-product of chlorine – in their urine, were up to 80 per cent more likely to have a food allergy.

Britain has seen a rise in food allergies in recent years, with up to ten million adults claiming to be unable to eat a variety of foods from milk to mustard – although scientists believe the figure may be exaggerated by the ‘worried well’.

Studies also estimate that four per cent of children have a food allergy. A rising number are diagnosed with gut allergies linked to common foods such as cow’s milk, wheat, soya, eggs, celery, kiwi fruit and other fruit and vegetables.

Food allergy can take the form of a sudden life-threatening reaction known as anaphylaxis, as well as eczema or an itchy rash. Much of the water supply in Britain is chlorinated to kill germs, although experts say it is at much lower levels than in the US.

They point out that, for British households at least, certain common household products are more likely to be sources of dichlorophenol than tap water.

Professor Jeni Colbourne, the chief inspector of drinking water, said strict regulations in the UK meant dichlorophenol is unlikely to be found in household taps.

She said its likeliest source for British consumers were household products impregnated with triclosan, commonly used in lipsticks, face washes, toothpaste and kitchen utensils. An anti-bacterial, it can break down to form dichlorophenol.

In a study of 2,211 American adults with the chemical in their urine, 411 were found to have a food allergy, while 1,016 had an environmental allergy.

The research, published in journal of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, concluded: ‘Excessive use of dichlorophenols may contribute to the increasing incidence of food allergies in Westernised societies.

‘This chemical is commonly found in pesticides and consumer insect and weed control products, as well as tap water.’

Lead author Dr Elina Jerschow added: ‘Previous studies have shown that both food allergies and environmental pollution are increasing in the United States.

‘Our study suggest these two trends might be linked, and that increased use of pesticides and other chemicals is associated with a higher prevalence of food allergies.’

Professor Colbourne insisted: ‘Currently in the UK consumer, exposure to dichlorophenol via tap water is considered to be minimal.

‘In the US generally chlorination is known to be less well controlled and relatively high doses of chlorine are used, so it would be reasonable to consider the risk of exposure to be generally higher.

‘In the UK exposure is more likely to come from other, non-tap water sources.’

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Resveratrol ‘can cut bowel cancer risk’

Mouse study only.  Previous studies have shown that it doesn't work on humans.  Resveratrol is a sort of religion among some

Resveratrol, found in the skins of red grapes and which gives the wine its colour, has long been known to have cancer-fighting properties, but scientists did not know how much was needed to be effective.

Tests on mice have now shown that a dose equivalent to five milligrams in humans halved the growth of bowel tumours.  Five milligrams were far more effective than a one gram dose.

Professor Karen Brown, who led the trials at Leicester University, said: ‘Everybody thinks that more is better, but we found that the low dose was more effective.

'We were amazed that it had any effect at all and even more surprised by the effectiveness of the low dose.’

Professor Brown will present her findings this week at Resveratrol 2012, a conference dedicated to research into the compound, at the university.

Previous studies have shown even tiny amounts of the compound can reach target tissues in humans.

Scientists have been exploring resveratrol’s potential to reduce the risk of heart disease, Alzheimer’s and even the ageing process. It is available as a supplement,

However, cancer trials involving resveratrol supplements have proved disappointing.  ‘People do take it as a supplement, but there’s no clinical evidence that this is of any benefit’ said Professor Brown.

There is some evidence that very high doses of resveratrol may interfere with certain medicines.

‘We’re still trying to understand the mechanism behind the way resveratrol works and see if it translates to human tissues and cells’ said Prof Brown.

Within two years, her team hopes to conduct a human trial on patients at high risk of bowel cancer.

Sarah Williams, of Cancer Research UK, warned: ‘People shouldn’t drink wine in an attempt to get any health benefits resveratrol can offer.

‘Alcohol has been estimated to cause around 12,500 cases of cancer a year in the UK. The best way to cut the risk of cancer through alcohol is to drink less.’

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Do  tomatoes ward off depression?

These are results from Japan so may not generalize.  The fact that no other  vegies had the effect suggests that this is simply a data dredging finding anyway

Eating tomatoes just a few times a week could halve the chances of suffering depression, a study claims.

Researchers analysed the mental health records and diet habits of just under 1,000 men and women aged 70 or over.

The results found those eating tomatoes two to six times a week were 46 per cent less likely to suffer the blues than those eating them less than once a week.

But other fruits and vegetables do not have the same benefits, the study found.

Eating healthy foods like cabbage, carrots, onions and pumpkins appeared to have little or no effect on psychological well-being.

Tomatoes are rich in antioxidant chemicals that are thought to protect against some diseases.

They are a particularly good source of lycopene, an antioxidant that gives them their deep red colour and has been linked with reducing the risk of prostate cancer and heart attacks.

British consumers get through half-a-million tonnes of tomatoes every year - the equivalent of 19 pounds per person a year.

However, this is still much less than in some Mediterranean countries.

A team of researchers from China and Japan, led by Dr Kaijun Niu from China’s Tianjin Medical University, wanted to investigate preliminary reports that lycopene might also promote psychological and well as physical health by reducing oxidative stress, or damage to healthy brain cells.

They analysed the mental health records and dietary habits of just under 1,000 elderly Japanese men and women aged 70 or over.

The results, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, found those eating tomatoes two to six times a week were 46 per cent less likely to suffer depression than those eating them less than once a week.

Eating tomatoes every day slashed the risk by 52 per cent.

But there was no obvious advantage to mental health from other vegetables.

The researchers said they cannot be sure if lycopene in tomatoes directly affects the mind, or whether it simply protects against the depression caused when people develop potentially fatal diseases like cancer.

In a report on the findings they said: ‘These results suggest that a tomato-rich diet may have a beneficial effect on the prevention of depressive symptoms.  ‘In contrast, no relationship was observed with intake of other kinds of vegetables.’

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Why chocolate warnings don't work on women

This is just a subset of the truth that the war on obesity will increase obesity

WARNING women that eating chocolate can make them fat may actually drive some to eat more, research from the University of Western Australia shows.

The joint study with the University of Strathclyde in Scotland found low restraint eaters - those not on a diet - showed a strong impulse to eat chocolate when presented with negative messaging, including warnings that chocolate could lead to obesity.

Women on a diet were also prone to rebel against attempts to scare them off chocolate, particularly by ads featuring thin models.

Researchers found dieters shown ads featuring thin models displayed an increased desire to eat chocolate coupled with greater feelings of wanting to avoid consumption, or indulged in higher consumption - and ultimately felt more guilt.

Lead author Professor Kevin Durkin said the reaction of a warning having a contrary effect was known as "reactance''.

"Reactance could be more marked among the low-restraint participants because they are generally less preoccupied with regulating their food intake and thus find external attempts to intervene in freely determined behaviour more jarring,'' Prof Durkin said.

The study involved 80 female participants between the ages of 17 and 26, categorised into low or high restraint and scored on a specifically designed "chocolate questionnaire'' developed by UWA-based psychologist Professor Werner Stritzke.

The research was published in the journal Appetite, which specialises in behavioural nutrition and the cultural, sensory, and physiological influences on intake of foods and drinks.

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Booze and fags and fatties save the government money

It does get very annoying when we've all the usual prodnoses telling us that we must eat our five a day, stop puffing on the gaspers and limit ourself to one small brown ale a week for the sake of our livers. This is all to "save the NHS", or to save the public accounts from the costs of dealing with us cancerous lard tubs as the cirrhosis explodes. Other than the ghastly nonsense of the puritans (you know, the worry that someone, somewhere, might be having fun), the despicable reduction in the freedom and liberty to chart our own course to the the inevitable grave, there's really only one other major problem with this point.

It ain't true.

Most certainly it's true that treating these diseases of a life well lived costs the NHS money. But not hacking out the pickled and fatty liver in our 50s costs the NHS much more. For people do go on to survive a decade or more of senile dementia, just as one alternative and even more awful fate. This costs more.

Some will recognise this as the argument that Philip Morris paid to be presented to the Czech Government. It was roundly condemned at the time as being a quite disgusting piece of pro-tobacco propaganda. It could even have been so but it did have the saving grace that it was actually true. For as a rough and ready guide, those things which kills us from chronic diseases around and about our retirement date cost the state much less than our surviving to a google old age does. And we've even got a Congressional Budget Office report making the case for us now:

In terms of the policy's effect on the budget, lower health care spending per capita would push down federal spending, but increased longevity would have the opposite effect. Throughout the first decade of the policy, reduced health care expenditures (primarily for Medicare and Medicaid) would mean that the federal government would spend less than it would have otherwise. The reduction in federal outlays would total $730 million over the period between 2013 and 2021.

During the second decade, however, the effects on longevity would begin to dominate and federal spending would be higher than it would have been otherwise — an effect that would continue through 2085. The two principal drivers of that increase in spending would be Social Security and Medicare.

Improvements in longevity from a reduction in smoking tend to have their greatest effect on the size of the elderly population and thus tend to boost spending on programs aimed at that population. Spending for Medicaid, by contrast, would be reduced throughout the period of the projection — a reflection of the wider age range of that program's beneficiaries.

The odds are that if you want to live a long life you shouldn't smoke. Nor eat nor drink as I do. But it still is really true that those of us who go out in our 50s and 60s from these diseases of an excess of indulgence save everyone else money by their not having to pay our pensions or health care bills for decades.

Stopping these behaviours may well produce longer lives: not that it's any of your damn business how other people decide to treat themselves. But it most certainly won't save any money.

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Chipping away at fried food myths

French fries, the scourge of nutritionists and the villain food of the film classic Super Size Me, are actually healthy for you, according to researchers from the Federico 2 University of Naples in Italy.

Doesn't that sound great now that summer's here and fish and chips on the beach is looming as an enticing prospect? "Frying is bad for us? Absolutely not!" said Professor Vincenzo Fogliano, who oversaw the study with Italian chef Giuseppe Daddio. "If it's fried in the correct way, a potato chip...can be an excellent nutritional product."

The pair arrived at this conclusion by studying the way that cooking oil – which is usually loaded with fat – is absorbed during the frying stage. Zucchini and eggplant, thought of as healthy, absorbed 30 per cent of the oil. Potatoes and pizza absorbed just five per cent.

Potatoes resisted the oil because they're full of starch, said Professor Fogliano. "A fundamental rule is that starch plays an important part in sealing the food being fried and reducing the oil absorption. The starch in potatoes....is particularly effective."

There's a caveat or two, however. "Attention must be paid to frozen or pre-fried products," said Professor Fogliano, who spoke to the Italian newspaper La Stampa. "In these cases, the quantity of food absorbed increases significantly."

Unfortunately, that describes 95 per cent of the fries and chips in Australia, said the CEO of Melbourne's Lord of the Fries restaurants, Mark Koronczyk. "This is a European article, and this is how they cook their fries in Europe," he said. Locally, "95 per cent of people selling fries use a frozen product...they're full of preservatives, they use beef tallow...they also use whey powder."

That includes all the fast food chains. Lord of the Fries are one of the few places that cook fries European-style, as per the Italian study. They even keep the skin on. "I think it's a great study, especially as we don't do frozen fries, we use fresh potatoes," said Mr Koronczyk. So few outlets in Australia used fresh potatoes as the process was labour-intensive, time-consuming and expensive.

"Our fries are the healthiest fries you can get," he said, "but I don't know if it's a healthy product."

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Stupid salt scare finally becoming unglued

More counterproductive medical wisdom:"What we found was the people with the lowest sodium intake had the worst cardiovascular outcomes".    I have been pointing to the stupidity of salt reduction since 2005  -- JR

The benefits of reduced sodium chloride consumption have long been accepted, but some experts say this should be taken with a grain of, well, salt. Mark Whittaker meets those shaking up accepted medical thought.

Any diabetic with high blood pressure who walks into George Jerums' Melbourne clinic will get the standard advice: if their salt intake is high, they should halve it. This is despite the fact that when Professor Jerums and his former PhD student, Dr Elif Ekinci, studied the salt intake of 638 elderly type-2 diabetics who went through his clinic at Heidelberg's Austin Health, they found that those who ate less salt were significantly more likely to die.

After 10 years, it emerged that for every extra 2.3 grams of sodium (equal to about a teaspoon of salt) in their urine over a day, their risk of dying fell by 28 per cent. Even though those who ate more salt tended to be fatter, fewer died from "all causes" and, contrary to what we've been told about the dangers of salt to the heart, fewer died from heart disease and stroke.

"If the person's blood pressure isn't controlled, it's an opportunity to say, 'Your salt intake is 200 [millimoles]. If you could halve it, that would help your blood pressure control'," says Jerums. "That's as far as we go. We don't say, 'But on the other hand, we don't really know what we're doing.'"

Surely, though, Jerums tells his patients to eat less salt because this study was just one flying in the face of decades of research proving that salt kills?

But it is not. It is one of many studies that have shown better results for diabetics, heart-attack sufferers, and people with high blood pressure who did not restrict their salt intake - the very people who get told to cut it most emphatically. About seven studies have linked increased salt intake to increased death rates, but there have been twice as many that have either found no link or that increased salt is associated with lower death rates.

Despite this, the consistent health message of recent decades has been that salt is bad.

When Ekinci and Jerums' research paper came out early last year, they were aware it challenged the salt-is-bad dogma but, in quick succession, four other studies followed with similar results.

The first was a study of 2807 Finns with type-1 diabetes. Those with both the lowest and highest sodium consumption died most often, while the majority in the middle were healthiest.

A study of 3681 Europeans with no history of cardiovascular disease found a death rate of 4.1 per cent in those with the lowest salt consumption, compared to 0.8 per cent in those with the highest salt consumption.

In November last year, a huge study of 28,800 Canadians found that those with the lowest salt intake died more often, as did those with the highest. The detrimental effects of a high-salt diet didn't kick in until their intake hit three to four times more salt than is currently recommended. However, those consuming the amount of salt recommended by health authorities were well within the low-sodium group that died more often and suffered more cardiovascular events.

But the most authoritative paper was by the independent non-profit Cochrane Collaboration, which specialises in analysing the known body of evidence on all manner of medical questions.

It looked at seven randomised controlled studies (RCTs) that had related salt intake to mortality with a total of 6200 people involved. It found "no strong evidence" linking salt to mortality or heart disease. This year, a separate Cochrane review of 163 studies said that reduced salt appeared to harm patients with bad hearts and both types of diabetes.

So why aren't the scientists rushing out to tell us of the latest research? Jerums and Ekinci tell me about six times between them that we can't read too much into observational studies like their own. "Observational studies are good for hypothesis building," says Ekinci, "but that's all." Even though they wrote in their paper that "such data calls into question universal recommendations that all adults should endeavour to reduce their salt intake", they won't say as much to me.  "We don't want to create a war," Ekinci says.

One man they say they don't want to start a war with is Professor Bruce Neal from the Sydney head office of the George Institute for Global Health, a body that promotes public health programs around the world and which has taken the low-salt message global.

Neal says he got interested in salt because Australia spends about $1.5 billion a year treating hypertension (dangerously high blood pressure) "and we only effectively reach about 10 per cent of those with it". By spending $10 million to $20 million on a salt-reduction campaign, he says we'd save just as many lives for 1 to 2 per cent of the cost.

Neal admits there is no direct evidence that cutting salt saves lives. "You have to sort of infer it by saying, 'We reduce salt, we reduce blood pressure.' We know that reducing blood pressure reduces risk. There's a bit of direct evidence that is missing, but there's a mass of other evidence to support the notion that it would be effective."

This is the crux of the matter: too much salt raises blood pressure; raised blood pressure is a major risk factor for heart disease, stroke and kidney failure. Therefore, it is assumed that reducing salt will reduce those killer diseases.

That's been the hope since the 1970s and it is still assumed by the majority medical opinion, despite the studies that have said the opposite.

There is strong evidence that blood-pressure-lowering drugs save lives and, according to Neal, the only reason we can't say the same thing for salt reduction is there's no money in it. "No one will make $1 billion from marketing salt-reduced food," he says. "On the contrary, the food industry makes lots of money by adding salt to low-quality product that would otherwise be unpalatable."

But in October, Neal got $3.4 million from the federal government's National Health and Medical Research Council to conduct the biggest randomised controlled trial of salt consumption ever. His team will go to northern China and split 360 villages, so half receive normal salt and half receive their salt mixed with 30 per cent potassium chloride and 10 per cent magnesium to lower the total sodium chloride content. The 700,000 people in all those villages will be observed for death and illness over the following four years.  [What a spupid research design!  The deprived villagers will just make it up by getting salt from elsewhere]

"[The study] will provide a very low-cost intervention for these villages in rural China," Neal says. "But much more broadly than that, it will provide the evidence to really drive forward efforts to take salt out of food and try to reduce salt levels in Australia."

Yet some suggest that it would be ludicrous for a Western country to base its salt policy on a study of people in northern China, which has the highest salt consumption in the world and therefore, not surprisingly, counts strokes as its biggest killer. Among them is New York doctor Michael Alderman, who in the 1990s was among the first health professionals to suggest that the crystalline enemy might not be so bad after all.

The US was in the midst of a heart disease epidemic in the early 1970s when Alderman set up a program to go into workplaces, find out who had high blood pressure and treat it. "I, like everybody else, knew that lowering sodium intake of people with high blood pressure would be a good idea," he says. "So our program began with a low-sodium diet. We stopped that after realising the effect of asking people to go on a low-sodium diet was to have patients drop out of treatment. Nobody liked it. It was punishing the victim."

Over the years, Alderman became interested in why some people with high blood pressure had strokes and heart attacks, while the vast majority lived long lives. He worked with colleague John Laragh and concluded that renin (a hormone that regulates blood pressure by controlling sodium retention, fluid retention and artery width) was the key. "What we found was that the hypertensive people with the high-plasma renin were much more likely to have heart attacks and strokes than the same hypertensives who didn't have a high renin [level]," he says. The significance of this was that sodium and renin were inversely related: the folks who ate the least salt had the highest renin and hence a greater risk of heart attack and stroke.

"So," Alderman adds, "I looked in the literature because I believed like everybody else in the early '90s that a low-sodium diet was good for you, but what was the evidence? There was only one article in the world literature that related sodium intake to subsequent cardiovascular mortality. It was a paper published in 1985 from a study in Honolulu of Japanese immigrants and they reported no relationship between sodium intake and health outcomes. That was it. There was nothing else."

Alderman's 4000 patients had all had the sodium in their urine measured, so he compared that to their subsequent sickness and death. "What we found was the people with the lowest sodium intake had the worst cardiovascular outcomes.

"I knew this was going to fly in the face of conventional wisdom ... my own wisdom. At any rate, I submitted [a paper on the results] to The New England Journal of Medicine, and I got about a 10-page review written by some advocate of a low-sodium diet. No criticism of the method, the only criticism was they didn't like the results. It was rejected by three of the leading journals. I thought, 'Jesus, it's never going to get published.' "

The Journal of Hypertension eventually published the paper in 1995, along with an editorial saying it had to be wrong because of the "totality of the evidence" against salt. Alderman still riles at the words: "At that point there was only the one other paper and it showed no relationship. There was no 'totality of evidence'. It was baloney."

Alderman was invited to become a member of an advisory committee of a US industry body, the Salt Institute, and accepted $US750 to attend a meeting. "After that, I was always attacked as being a shill for the Salt Institute," he says. "I stayed on that committee for seven or eight years but never took any more money from them or had any support for my research from them or any commercial link, but my work was always dismissed on the basis that I was a crook. That only abated as more and more evidence appeared, culminating in those recent papers. But it doesn't seem to change policy. I find this so extraordinary."

Australia has a "suggested dietary target" of approximately four grams of salt a day: four-fifths of a teaspoon. But anyone consuming that much would be well inside the level at which many studies have shown people die more often.

When I ask Neal about Alderman's assertion that we should prove salt reduction is safe before we impose it on the population, he replies: "Alderman has made a career out of being a vocal sceptic. If you look at the totality of the evidence from all the different types of studies, it's a very clear picture ... humans evolved to live on a diet of less than a gram of sodium a day. They're not just getting a bit more than they actually need, they're getting 10 times more than they actually require. So it's not really a question of us taking away something that is normal and need to prove it safe; to the contrary, if we're going to pour salt into people at this level, we have to prove it is safe before we do it."

I didn't look at the totality of the evidence, but the Cochrane Collaboration did. It found salt reduction might be of benefit in northern China, but that "these results do not support that sodium reduction may have net beneficial effects in a population of Caucasians". And that "Reduced sodium intake seems to harm patients with heart insufficiency and diabetes type-1 and -2. In all three patient groups, reduced sodium intake is associated with increased mortality."

The Cochrane authors concluded: "After more than 150 RCTs and 13 population studies without an obvious signal in favour of sodium reduction, another position could be to accept that such a signal may not exist."

Michael Alderman can understand why Jerums and Ekinci are shy of starting a fight. "It hurt me to take the position I did," he says. "I happened to have some long-term research grants, but if I were a young investigator now trying to get grants, I would be very nervous."

Having said that, Alderman predicts the debate will be over by mid-decade and that salt's good reputation will be restored: "The evidence is so overwhelming. It's harder and harder for the zealots to say with each new paper there's something wrong with it ... It's not enough for them to say, 'I don't like your evidence.' They've got to have some evidence themselves."

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Unfounded alcohol in pregnancy fears

HARDLY a day goes by without the media enlightening us with some ground-breaking new research to guide us along the rocky road of life.

A recent one that caught my eye was the output from Bristol and Oxford universities in Britain that the offspring of women who consumed ("as little as") two glasses of wine a week during pregnancy were (as much as) 1.8 IQ points less intelligent by the age of eight than peers whose mothers had abstained.

I can't help wondering how it is possible to prove that an eight-year-old would be (about) 1.8 per cent smarter if mummy hadn't been bingeing on two glasses of wine a week all those years ago.

Assuming this research is accurate and within any normal margin of error for IQ testing - which I would doubt - is it not possible that the drinking mothers are simply less intelligent than the non-drinking ones and genes are just doing what genes do? Are we to assume that mothers would respond honestly and without denial when questioned about their drinking habits while pregnant? Is it to be deduced that the more the mothers drank, the stupider the children became? Do the children of alcoholic mothers grow up to be research scientists? How much was Justin Bieber's mother drinking when he was in utero?

Today alcohol is good for us and tomorrow it's the devil's blood. Smoking rots your brain but can be beneficial if you want to concentrate for long periods or lose weight. There is good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, good fat and bad fat, good stress and bad stress. Some drugs are good for you, some drugs are bad for you (especially the illegal ones that don't attract GST). Exercise uplifts the mood unless the thought of the gym makes you depressed. Generally, sex is good for you but unprotected sex is bad unless you're married. If you're married, an affair can be good for the marriage or bad, depending on the context and whether or not you get found out. Mobile phones absolutely must cause cancer and we'll prove that if it kills us. And so on.

Why do I think that the people pumping out this stuff are funded based on the achievement of some sort of a result rather than its accuracy or relevance?

So, for all you pregnant women out there, may I suggest the following: keep knocking back the chardy and the strawberry daiquiris at mothers' group. You may be carrying the next Justin Bieber in there and it would be tragic if you deprived the world of that.

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Aspirin can cut liver cancers and deaths study finds

The "once a month" is a bit of a red flag.  Such a low incidence seems unlikely to have a therapeutic benefit.  The study probably shows only that taking preventive medicine is a middle class thing

Aspirin can reduce the risk of developing liver cancer or dying from chronic liver disease by around 50 per cent even if only taken monthly, a study has suggested.

People who said they had taken aspirin at least once a month in the past year were 49 per cent less likely to develop the most common for of liver cancer and 50 per cent less likely to die from chronic liver disease in the next ten years when compared with people who did not take the painkiller.

Aspirin has been hailed as a wonder drug after several studies have now found that it can significantly reduce the risk of cancer developing as well as cutting the chances of a heart attack and stroke.

The latest research published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute used questionnaires from 300,000 people aged 50 to 71 who reported their own use of a range of painkillers in the previous 12 months and linked them to registers of cancer cases and deaths over the following ten to 12 years.

In that time 250 people developed hepatocellular carcinoma and 428 died from chronic liver disease.

Almost half of cases of HCC occur in people who already have chronic liver disease and both are connected to hepatitis infections, alcohol, certain metabolic disorders and diet.

Lead author Dr Vikrant Sahasrabuddhe, from the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute, wrote in the journal: "This is the first large-scale, population-based evidence for reduced risks of liver cancer incidence and liver disease mortality associated with the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.

"Aspirin, in particular, when used exclusively or with other non-aspirin NSAIDs showed a consistent protective effect related to both HCC incidence and CLD mortality, regardless of the frequency or exclusivity of use."

In an accompanying comment article Drs Isra Levy and Carolyn Pim, both from the Department of Epidemiology and Community Medicine at the University of Ottawa in Canada, said: "The investigators make the promising observation that, in a large, prospective, cohort study, use of aspirin and other NSAIDs was associated with lower risk of death due to chronic inflammatory liver disease, and aspirin use was linked to reduced risk of developing HCC.

"Although the emerging research findings on cancer impacts have not yet translated into clinical recommendations such as those for prevention of vascular disease by the use of daily aspirin, the hype is building.

"Yet enthusiasm among health professionals remains tempered. NSAIDs, including aspirin, are well known to increase the risk of bleeding, especially gastrointestinal bleeding and it behoves those making individual clinical or population-level policy recommendations to carefully consider any potential benefit in light of the concomitant potential for inadvertent harm.

"For these reasons, even for cardiovascular disease prevention, use of aspirin continues to be questioned."

They said many of the causes of liver disease and cancer can be prevented through vaccination and lifestyle and should be considered before medical prevention.

The researchers acknowledged that the most serious side effect of aspirin is stomach bleeding and people with liver problems are especially vulnerable to bleeds. It is not known how many people in the study died from bleeds, they said.

Also they did not know why people were taking aspirin, as it may have been to prevent a heart attack indicating they already had health problems, or the dose they were taking or for how long.

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The old fructose scare rumbles on

Since ordinary cane-sugar is a compound of fructose and glucose, we are all dead anyway, according to their logic.  And a lot of trials have in fact shown that fructose PREVENTS diabetes

We want everything to be sweeter these days – our bread, our pies, our strawberries – and it's killing us. That, crudely summarised, is the gist of a worrying new study in the British Medical Journal. Sugar – sucrose, the plain white stuff you buy by the pound – isn’t the main problem, though. It’s high fructose corn syrup we should be concerned about. This is the dead cheap sweetener made from maize, which in many countries, such as the United States, is preferred to sugar by the food industry. Maize is cheap in the US and has been for several decades, since it’s heavily subsidised by the government. Proper sugar is much more expensive, so not surprisingly Coca-Cola and Pepsi have been using HFCS to sweeten their delicious beverages in the US since the Eighties. In Britain, where HFCS is often called glucose-fructose syrup on ingredients labels, Coke and other soft drinks still use sucrose, by and large.

There all sorts of worries about HFCS and its effect on our health. Never before in human history have we been guzzling so much fructose, and it might be even worse for us than ordinary sugar. Wise heads like the great Dr Atkins and John Yudkin cautioned years ago about our sugar addiction and the terrible hazards of the misguided craze for low-fat diets. (Yudkin wrote the landmark work on the subject, Pure, White and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us, back in 1972.) But their warnings were ignored, partly because they didn’t suit the powerful food industry.

Now we are paying the price for our sweet tooth. Not only are a quarter of Britons overweight today, but on the horizon looms the spectre of one of the world’s most serious chronic diseases: type 2 diabetes. Countries that use a lot of HFCS in their food supply have a significantly higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes, the BMJ reports, than countries that do not use the sweetener. The US had the highest per capita consumption – the average American gets through 25kg (55 lbs) HFCS a year. Second was Hungary (16 kg per person).

The good news for Britain is that we are, at the moment, quite low down the scale: we only eat or drink half a kilo of HFCS a year. As a society, we should be very wary of taking on board more of this stuff. Tim Lobstein of the International Association for the Study of Obesity says that if HFCS is a risk factor for diabetes, “we need to rewrite national dietary guidelines and review agriculture trade policies. HFCS will join trans fats and salt as ingredients to avoid.”

Drinks made with HFCS have 30 per cent more fructose than if they were made with sucrose, Lobstein says, and there is growing evidence that the body metabolises fructose differently from glucose: independently of insulin and primarily in the liver, where it is converted to fat. “This may be contributing to the rise in the prevalence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, a condition that is increasing among Hispanic people in the US and Mexico,” says Lobstein.

But what to do, if you live in America, like drinking Coke and want to avoid HFCS? There is an answer: kosher Coke. Passover Coke is produced in Atlanta on a special production line, supervised by a rabbi. Because Jews are forbidden from eating leaven over Passover, grain-derived syrup is not permitted. So cane sugar is used instead. According to Consumer Reports, there are three sources of sugared Coke in the US: Passover Coke, (often expensive) Mexican imports, and a Coca-Cola bottler in Cleveland, which still uses sucrose. This Coke not only avoids the worrying high fructose corn syrup, but taste tests suggest that it has a purer, cleaner sweetness. Even so, bearing in mind John Yudkin's disturbing findings in Pure White and Deadly, it's probably best to drink it in moderation.

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Too many marathons can kill, warn doctors

Doing too many marathons could kill you, doctors have said in a stark warning about the dangers of taking too much vigorous exercise.

Fitness fanatics should do “just one or a few” marathons or full-distance triathlons, say the cardiologists, because over-exerting the heart for years can lead to long-term damage.

There is now convincing evidence that repeatedly asking the heart to pump “massive” volumes of blood, for hours at a time, can lead to an array of problems, they say.

These include overstretching of the organ’s chambers, thickening of its walls and changes to electrical signalling. These could trigger potentially dangerous heart rhythm problems.

“In addition, long-term excessive exercise may accelerate aging in the heart, as evidenced by increased coronary artery calcification, diastolic ventricular dysfunction, and large-artery wall stiffening,” they write in the journal Heart.

Dr James O’Keefe and Carl Lavie, from St Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, and the Pennington Biomedical Research Centre in Baton Rouge, US, say the heart is only designed for “short bursts” of intense activity.

They cite the example of Micah True, the hero of the book Born to Run about ultra-endurance running.

He died in March, aged 58, on a 12-mile training run in New Mexico. He routinely ran a marathon a day, sometimes more.

They believe that decades of such exertion led him to develop Phidippides cardiomyopathy.

Named after the original runner, who died delivering news of the Greeks’ victory at Marathon, it is “the constellation of cardiac pathology that has been in observed in the hearts of some veteran extreme endurance athletes”.

They concluded that most people should limit vigorous exercise to 30 to 50 minutes a day.

“If one really wants to do a marathon or full-distance triathlon etc, it may be best to do just one or a few and then proceed to safer and healthier exercise patterns,” they advise.

No amount light to moderate exercise is harmful, they note.

“A routine of moderate physical activity will add life to your years, as well as years to your life.

“In contrast, running too fast, too far, and for too many years may speed one’s progress towards the finish line of life.”

Ellen Mason, senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said: “Whether you’re taking part in an endurance event, watching your weight or staying healthy after a heart attack, it’s important to build up your activity levels gradually, especially if you’ve not exercised in a while.”

SOURCE







Citrus warning alarmist: medicos



WARNINGS about "killer grapefruit" have been blown out of proportion, according to two Canberra medicos who say it is safe to eat the tart citrus fruit unless specifically prohibited by your doctor or pharmacist.

This week the Canadian Medical Association Journal reported the number of drugs that can cause serious problems when taken with grapefruit increased from 17 to 43.

As little as one grapefruit or one glass of grapefruit juice can affect some medications and cause conditions such as irregular heartbeat, kidney failure, muscle breakdown, difficulty with breathing and blood clots.

And some very common drugs are on the danger list including cholesterol-lowering medication Lipitor, Verapamil, which is used to treat high blood pressure, and the chemotherapy drug Vincristine.

But Professor of Pharmacy at the University of Canberra Gabrielle Cooper said Australian pharmacists and doctors were aware of problem.

"Grapefruit has a strange interaction with a range of drugs and when a pharmacist dispenses that group of drugs they put a sticker on the box saying do not use with grapefruit," she said.

Dr Cooper said grapefruit can be a danger because it interferes with how drugs break down and can cause a drug overdose.

"There is an acidic interaction but there is also a metabolic pathway inhibition which occurs with grapefruit.It stops things being excreted normally.

"We have pathways in our body which have enzymes involved and that enzyme is inhibited by that grapefruit so it stops that drug being removed by the body in the appropriate time frame so you build it up."

Chairman of the ACT Medicare Local Board Rashmi Sharma said Warfarin, an anticoagulant that stops blood clotting, interacts with anything green.

"The take home message is that it's not just grapefruit juice that can affect the enzyme system, so without wanting to be alarmist it's important that people do tell their doctors what they are taking," Dr Sharma said.

And other citrus fruits including Seville oranges, limes and pomelos can cause the same effect as grapefruit.

"It's not a new warning, we were aware and as prescribers we warn our patients.'

SOURCE

Just one fizzy drink a day raises men's risk of aggressive prostate cancer by 40%

Cripes!  I must have a huge prostate.  I drink gallons of the stuff.  Funny that scans show me as normal!  Some sensible comments at the end of the article

One sugary soft drink a day could raise a man’s odds of developing prostate cancer.  A 15-year study found those who drank 300ml of a fizzy drink a day – slightly less than a standard can – were 40 per cent more likely to develop the disease than those who never consumed the drinks.

Worryingly, the risk applied not to early-stage disease that was spotted via blood tests but to cancers that had progressed enough to cause symptoms.

This is significant as faster-growing forms of prostate cancer are more likely to be fatal.

It is thought that sugar triggers the release of the hormone insulin, which feeds tumours.

Prostate cancer is the most common type in British men, affecting almost 41,000 a year and killing more than 10,000.

The study, published in the respected American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, is far from the first to link the sugary soft drinks enjoyed by millions of Britons every day to poor health. Previous research has flagged up heart attacks, diabetes, weight gain, brittle bones, pancreatic cancer, muscle weakness and paralysis as potential risks.

The Swedish scientists behind the latest work said that while more research is needed before the link with prostate cancer can be confirmed, there are already ‘plenty of reasons’ to cut back on soft drinks.

For the study, they tracked the health of more than 8,000 men aged 45 to 73 for an average of 15 years. The men, who were in good health at the start of the study, were also quizzed about what they liked to eat and drink.

At the end of the study, they compared the dietary habits of the men who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer with those who remained healthy and found a clear link between sugary drinks and the disease.

Lund University researcher Isabel Drake said: ‘Among the men who drank a lot of soft drinks... we saw an increased risk of prostate cancer of around 40 per cent.’ The analysis also linked large amounts of rice and pasta, cakes and biscuits, and sugary breakfast cereals with a less serious form of the disease.

There was no link with fruit juice. Diet drinks, and tea and coffee with sugar, were not included in the study.

The researchers said that although genetics plays a bigger role in prostate cancer than in many other tumours, diet also appears to be important. However, Mrs Drake, a PhD student, added that more research is needed to prove the link.

British experts also urged caution over the findings. Dr  Iain Frame, director of research at Prostate Cancer UK, said:  ‘We cannot be certain whether any particular dietary pattern has a significant impact on a man’s risk of getting prostate cancer but it is highly unlikely that any single food source will lead to an increased chance of developing the disease.

SOURCE




'My life was hell': Loving husband who said Parkinson's drug made him a 'gay sex addict' awarded £160,000 by French court

The drug company DOES warn of such side-effects in some people so should it be blamed if nobody reads its warnings?  I would have thought that the prescribing doctor and even the pharmacist could be seen as more responsible than the company.  Just what the company was warning at the time he started on the drug may be an issue, however

A Parkinson's sufferer has won a six figure pay-out against a drug giant after his medication turned him into a 'gay sex and gambling addict'.

Didier Jambart had been a well respected man, an upstanding member of the community in Nantes, western France, and a loving father and husband.

But within two years of taking the drug Requip he was so addicted to both his vices he sold his children's toys to raise money and advertised himself on the internet for sex. He has now been given £160,000 in damages after a court in Rennes, France, upheld his claims.

The ground-breaking ruling was made yesterday by the appeal court, which awarded the damages to Mr Jambart from GlaxoSmithKline, the British pharmaceuticals giant.

With his wife Christine beside him, Mr Jambart, 52, broke down in tears as judges upheld his claim that his life had become 'hell' after he started taking Requip, a drug made by GSK.

He told reporters 'this is a great day' after the court threw out the firm's appeal against an earlier ruling to award him 117,000 euros.

The court increased the level of damages to 197,468.83 euros after finding that there was 'serious, precise and corroborated' evidence to blame his transformation on Requip.

Mr Jambart said: 'It's been a seven-year battle with our limited means for recognition of the fact that GSK lied to us and shattered our lives.'

He added: 'I am happy that justice has been done. I am happy for my wife and my children. I am at last going to be able to sleep at night and profit from life. '

But he added that the money he was awarded was not like winning the lottery, and said: 'This will never replace the years of pain.'

The court heard that Mr Jambart began taking Requip for Parkinson's disease in 2003.

The formerly well respected bank manager, local councillor and a father of two from Nantes in western France, had tried to commit suicide eight times after he turned into a sex-crazed gambling addict.

He told the court that he had emptied his bank account, sold his children's toys and stolen money from work colleagues, friends and neighbours.

In total he gambled away a total of 82,000 euros, mostly placing internet bets on horse races, and engaged in a 'frantic search for gay sex'.  He began exhibiting himself on internet websites and arranging encounters, one of which resulted in him being raped.

He said his family had not understood what was going on at first.

But his behaviour returned to normal when he stumbled upon a website that made the link between Requip and addictions in 2005, and stopped taking the drug.

The court heard that warnings about Requip's side-effects had been made public in 2006. Mr Jambart said that GSK should have informed patients earlier.

SOURCE

Study finds possible air pollution link to autism

This study in fact had NO DATA on air pollution.  They just used addresses as a proxy, a very inexact and error-prone  procedure. 

There are some sensible comments at the foot of the article below

A new report has indicated that exposure to traffic-related air pollution during pregnancy and infancy may be linked to an increased risk of autism.

Researchers from the University of Southern California monitored the relationship between air quality and autism.

This study used the addresses of mothers in the US state to estimate their exposure to pollution while pregnant and with a young child.

The report found children living in homes with the highest levels of traffic-related air pollution were three times more likely to have autism, compared to those with lower exposure.

Exposure was most risky during the mother's pregnancy, and in the first year of a child's life.

Australian researchers say the results warrant more study and have urged parents not to panic.

Professor Andrew Whitehouse from the Telethon Institute of Child Health Research says the results back up earlier studies in the field.

"It's a very interesting finding there is no doubt about that," he said.  "We've known for many years that there is likely to be at least a handful of environmental causes that may contribute to autism."

However, Professor Whitehouse says the new findings raise a number of questions.  "My message to parents is don't panic," he said.   "This study did not find that air pollution causes autism. What they've found is an association with autism.

"We need to direct further research into finding out whether this is lifestyle factors or nutritional factors, or whether it is air pollution but without that further research, we just don't know."

The study was published online in the Archives of General Psychiatry journal.

SOURCE






Homeopathy regime is rejected as judge tells parents to immunise child

Homeopathic beliefs can be a dangerous mental illness -- as shown in this case.  The mother believes in her homeopathic "vaccinations"  DESPITE the fact that her daughter got whooping cough, a very nasty and sometimes fatal illness.  Homeopathic potions are just water so have placebo value only

A JUDGE has ordered a couple to immunise their eight-year-old daughter according to government health guidelines, in a rebuke to the homeopathic regime pursued by the mother.

But the father will shoulder the cost of doing so.

The mother had sought in a injunction in the Family Court to stop the father and his partner from immunising the child without her written permission.

She made the application after discovering that her daughter's stepmother had secretly taken the child to a medical centre to have her immunised against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B, polio, HIB, measles, mumps, rubella and meningococcal C.

Previously, the mother had been arranging homeopathic vaccines.

She told the court that she adhered to a "simple and healthy way of life", that included eating organic food, using non-toxic cleaning products and sending the child to a Rudolph Steiner school where the toys were made from natural products such as wool, wax and silk.

Most parents at the school focused on "building up the immune system of the child through homeopathics", she told the court.

But when the girl was five, she contracted whooping cough, and the father and his new partner became concerned that she was not vaccinated, possibly placing their new baby at risk.

The stepmother then took her to the medical centre for a course of traditional immunisations, with the support of the child's father, but without the mother's consent or knowledge.

This upset the mother, in part because it engendered feelings of disempowerment, but also because she feared the health risks of traditional immunisation.

She told the court: "The homeoprophylaxis regime is more than adequate for her needs, provides her with immunity against childhood diseases and does so in a far safer and more risk averse way."

A doctor in homeopathic medicine told the court that homeopathic vaccination was safe and effective, whereas traditional vaccination had short- and long-term risks, including a link to ADHD and autism.

But Justice Bennett accepted the evidence of a doctor at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, who said there was insufficient evidence of the effectiveness of homeopathic immunisation to justify its replacement of traditional immunisation.

The links to ADHD and autism had been disproved by studies in Scandinavia, France and the United States, the doctor said.

Justice Bennett said the risks associated with traditional immunisation did not outweigh the risks of infection.

"It appears to me that the efficacy of homeopathic vaccines in preventing infectious diseases has not been adequately scientifically demonstrated," she said.

However, the mother has lodged an appeal.

The case is one of several before the courts that involve differing philosophies over childhood vaccination.

The Federal Magistrates Court was asked to intervene between two parents disputing whether their daughter should be immunised in 2010, resulting in an order for the child to undergo the immunisation program recommended by the federal Health Department.

SOURCE